Chapter 231: Killing The Main Power Grid

The red emergency lights strobed across the server room. The chill of the chilled metal bit into my skin. The floor beneath my boots vibrated. A low, grinding rumble traveled up the steel beams of the skyscraper.

Sebastian stood in the doorway. He gripped his handgun. His knuckles turned white. The radio on his belt hissed with static and the sharp cracks of gunfire.

"Bob," Sebastian said into the radio. "Give me numbers."

"Twelve men," Bob answered. His voice strained over the noise. "Heavy armor. Assault rifles. They rammed a reinforced cash transport truck through the front glass. The security desk is rubble. We are falling back to the secondary blast doors."

Victor brought a battering ram to our front door.

I turned back to the metal console. The main power grid failed, but the core servers ran on a heavy battery backup system. The secondary monitor flickered to life. I accessed the lobby surveillance feed.

I stared at the screen.

The pristine marble lobby looked like a disaster zone. A massive, black armored truck sat parked in the center of the room. The reinforced steel bumper rested on top of the crushed reception desk. Shards of thick glass littered the floor, catching the harsh glare of the truck’s headlights.

Men in black tactical vests poured out of the back of the transport. They moved with desperate, frantic energy. They fired suppression rounds into the corridors, forcing our security team to retreat.

Then, a man stepped out of the passenger side of the truck.

He wore a dark suit. The fabric hung loose on his frame. His face looked like a bruised, swollen mask of purple and black flesh. The jaw we broke in the basement remained wired shut. He held a high-capacity rifle in his hands.

Victor Salazar.

He looked up at the security camera. His dark eyes burned with a feverish, unhinged sickness. He knew I watched him. He smiled, a grotesque twisting of his ruined face.

He did not come to steal data. He did not come to negotiate. He came to kill us. He brought a dozen men willing to die for a final payout or a final act of revenge.

"He is in the lobby," I told Sebastian.

Sebastian stepped behind my stool. He looked at the monitor. He saw the face of the man who tormented me. The man who strapped explosives to his chest. The man who sent the prison letter.

Sebastian reached down and touched my shoulder. His fingers dug into the thick wool of my sweater. His touch grounded my racing pulse. He offered no false comfort. He offered a shared reality. We faced a fight for our lives.

"Victor is out of time," Sebastian said. "His offshore funds are frozen. His men abandoned the docks and the warehouses. He brought his last dozen fighters. This is a suicide mission."

"He wants to drag us down with him," I replied.

The radio crackled again.

"Boss," Bob called out. "They are pushing past the elevators. They are bringing heavy breaching charges to the stairwell doors. We cannot hold the ground floor. Requesting orders."

Sebastian picked up the heavy plastic radio. He pressed the transmission button. He did not hesitate. He did not ask for a status update on the building damage.

"Fall back," Sebastian commanded. "Let them take the lobby."

"Copy," Bob said.

"Bob," Sebastian added. His voice dropped to a cold, flat register. "No prisoners tonight. No containment. You see a man in black tactical gear, you put a bullet in his head. Execute them all."

"Understood," Bob replied. The transmission clicked off.

Sebastian issued a kill order. He sanctioned the execution of thirteen men inside our corporate headquarters. The business rules dissolved. The legal boundaries vanished. Victor forced our hand, and Sebastian met the escalation with lethal force.

Sebastian dropped the radio. He looked down at me.

"The stairwells are reinforced steel," I said. "They will need time to blow the locks."

"They possess breaching charges," Sebastian countered. "They will blow the doors. They will climb the stairs. They want to reach this floor. They want the executive suite."

"We have thirty armed men in this building," I stated. I calculated our odds. "We outnumber them."

"They possess heavy armor and military rifles," Sebastian said. "A shootout in the bright, open corridors favors their weapons. It turns our hallways into a shooting gallery. We lose men. We risk a stray bullet finding you."

I looked at his face. The dim red light cast sharp shadows across his jaw. He wanted an advantage. He wanted to tilt the board in our favor.

"What do you need?" I asked.

"I need the dark," Sebastian said. "My men know every corner of this building. We know the blind spots. We know the angles. Victor’s men rely on brute force and sight. I want to blind them."

He wanted to cut the power. He wanted to plunge seventy stories of glass and steel into total darkness.

"The emergency lights run on a separate circuit," I explained. "They trigger automatically when the main grid fails. To cut them, I have to override the building's safety protocols. I have to kill the central battery."

"Do it," Sebastian ordered.

I turned back to the keyboard. I opened the root command prompt.

"If I kill the battery, the servers die," I warned him. "We lose the camera feeds. We lose the electronic locks. The electronic keypads on the doors will fail. The doors will default to manual deadbolts. We will be blind on the monitors."

"I do not need monitors to hunt," Sebastian said. He racked the slide of his handgun. A bullet chambered with a sharp, metallic snap. "Shut it down."